Science Fiction
Locating Science Fiction is arguably Milner’s most important, potentially paradigm-shifting, book. Academic literary criticism had tended to locate science fiction primarily in relation to the older genre of utopia; fan criticism primarily in relation to fantasy and science fiction in other media, especially film and television; popular fiction studies primarily in relation to such contemporary genres as the romance novel and the thriller. Milner’s book relocates science fiction in relation not only to these other genres and media, but also to the historical and geographic contexts of its emergence and development. Locating Science Fiction sought to move science fiction theory and criticism away from the prescriptively abstract dialectics of cognition and estrangement associated with Fredric Jameson and Darko Suvin, and towards an empirically grounded understanding of what is actually a messy amalgam of texts, practices and artefacts. Inspired by Williams, Bourdieu and Franco Moretti’s application of world systems theory to literary studies, it drew on the disciplinary competences of comparative literature, cultural studies, critical theory and sociology to produce a powerfully distinctive mode of analysis, engagement and argument. The concluding chapter is preoccupied with environmentalist thematics occasioned by Milner’s growing interest in Green politics.
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Famous quotes containing the words science and/or fiction:
“All science requires mathematics. The knowledge of mathematical things is almost innate in us.... This is the easiest of sciences, a fact which is obvious in that no one’s brain rejects it; for laymen and people who are utterly illiterate know how to count and reckon.”
—Roger Bacon (c. 1214–c. 1294)
“The purpose of a work of fiction is to appeal to the lingering after-effects in the reader’s mind as differing from, say, the purpose of oratory or philosophy which respectively leave people in a fighting or thoughtful mood.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)